CODA: Volume XV, No 2, SUMMER 1998

The Time of the Primitives
James Chace

It is an irony of history that at a time when the United States possesses an overwhelming preponderance of power, it so often acts like a crippled giant. The root cause of this behavior lies with Congress. At this writing in early May 1998, Congress has been reluctant to approve legislation to pay the $819 million in back dues that Washington owes the United Nations. By attaching an anti-abortion amendment to this legislation, the Republican Congress will surely force the White House to veto it.

The Republicans are also opposed to granting the administration's request to add $18 billion to the coffers of the International Monetary Fund, which have been depleted by more than $100 billion in loans to East Asia, unless President Clinton cooperates with a House inquiry into Democratic fundraising for the 1996 presidential campaign.

Even when Congress has given the administration what it wants in order to pursue its post-Cold War foreign policy, the attention paid to the issues have been inadequate or wrongheaded. Although the Senate approved by a wide margin the enlargement of NATO to include the three Central European countries of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the debate was, according to George Kennan, the dean of America's Russian experts, "superficial and ill informed." Aside from the central question of whether or not NATO enlargement is desirable-many believe it was unwarranted because it has the potential of causing new problems where none existed-the NATO debate was characterized by provocative references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Such statements were wholly at variance with the truth of the matter: that Russia is hoping desperately to get into Europe peacefully, not to threaten it with another Cold War.

What we are seeing at the dawn of the millennium is a general refusal by Congress-and especially by Republicans, many of whom were elected in 1994 with little knowledge of or interest in the outside world-to accept the international role of the American leviathan.

Increasingly, the policy of the Republican leadership in the House and Senate resembles that of another era-that of Senator Robert Taft in the wake of the 1948 presidential election. The heyday of bipartisanship was actually between 1946 and 1948, when the Republicans, emboldened by their winning of a majority in Congress for the first time in 18 years, prepared for another electoral triumph in the presidential campaign of 1948. When Harry Truman upset all predictions and defeated the internationalist former governor of New York, Thomas Dewey, the bitterness of the Republicans showed itself not only in the ad hominem attacks by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his hysterical anticommunist crusade, but also in Senator Taft, who hoped to gain the Republican presidential nomination in 1952, a prize he had vainly sought since 1940.

Taft was not an easy man. He was humorless in debate and determined to curb America's involvement in the outside world. He believed it was the duty of the opposition to oppose-and to do little else. He voted against the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and he was adamant in opposing the Bretton Woods agreements that set up the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Taft's main quarrel with the Fund was that it would not and could not stabilize shaky currencies. "If we try to stabilize conditions with this fund it will be only pouring money down a rathole," he said. He did not think the United States should play "Santa Claus."

Like so many senators today, Taft did not seem to comprehend that foreign financial turmoil, if it occurs on a sufficiently large scale, could adversely affect the domestic economy of the United States. Stable monetary values promote a vibrant trading system, which might well allow America to export its goods in order to provide jobs at home, as well to reduce its ballooning trade deficit.

Among the know-nothings of today, there is a paradoxical view that the United States is so involved in the global economy that its government's foreign policy is all but irrelevant. But, as Thomas Friedman has pointed out in the New York Times (April 18, 1998), the new world order has not yet rendered the nation-state superfluous. The trade and financial integration that American workers and "techies" see as the engine generating enormous wealth in the country today is running, as Friedman described it, "in a world stabilized by a benign superpower called the United States of America, with its capital in Washington, D.C."

An American company like IBM, no matter how many subsidiaries it has from Canada to Australia, is still an American company, dependent on American power and purpose. If IBM gets in trouble, who does it call? Not America Online, as Friedman put it. It would most likely call Washington to put pressure on international institutions in which the United States holds the decisive weight of voting power, or, in the worst case, on the U.S. Marines.

The question before us-and before much of the world-is whether American hegemony is indeed "benign." The answer to that question rests squarely on how the United States supports, sustains, and reforms international institutions. And that, in turn, depends on America's sense of its power and purpose.

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